Collective Of Five Olympic Sport Governing Bodies Strikes Its First Sponsor Deal

Team Player: USA Fencing, whose Lee Kiefer won gold in foil at the 2024 Paris Olympics, is part of the United Sports Collective, a joint initiative by five national governing bodies to sell sponsorships.FRANCK FIFE/AFP via Getty ImagesAcross more than four years managing corporate partnerships for USRowing—the sport’s national governing body, a nonprofit that oversees and promotes rowing at all levels in the United States—Amanda Cobb has repeatedly run into the same obstacle when pitching new sponsors. “You’re not really big enough,” she recalls being told by brands, the unfortunate reality of a sports organization of only 79,000 individuals—not even a fifth of USA Swimming’s membership, for instance.That’s why, in March, USRowing helped form the United Sports Collective, a joint initiative by the national governing bodies of five Olympic sports to combat those issues of scale and sell more sponsorships.Nine months later, the effort is paying off.On Thursday, the collective will announce its first partnership, a deal with wealth management platform Range that will pay $1.9 million over four years. The proceeds will be split evenly among four participating national governing bodies: USRowing, USA Fencing, USA Cycling and USA Lacrosse, which is not formally part of the collective but was included in this arrangement. The combination gives Range access to the four NGBs’ roughly 700,000 members, even without the initiative’s other two regular constituents, US Sailing and US Squash.“So many of our [existing] corporate partners are from our world,” Cobb says. “They’re people that know rowing, they’re people that are familiar with our sport, they’re people that are intensely passionate about it, and those are generally where our leads come from. I don’t know if we would’ve gotten to Range without somebody in this group really feeling passionate about sports and being able to take that as an entry point.”Cobb credits USA Fencing CEO Phil Andrews for bringing the Range deal to the table. He started speaking with the company in September but quickly concluded that his organization alone didn’t have enough reach to win over an app seeking to convert new users. Instead, he pointed Range toward the collective, which also offers marketers a more active year-round calendar to activate against. Fencing, for example, is typically contested during the winter months while rowing, cycling and lacrosse are generally spring or summer sports.This outcome is exactly what Andrews had in mind when the idea for the collective emerged from a conversation he had last year with then-US Sailing CEO Alan Ostfield. Both had a desire to attract new, non-endemic sponsors and scale what they could offer partners. USRowing, US Squash and USA Cycling joined the discussion a few months later, and with similar audiences across all five organizations, working together just made sense.“We’re really selling a demographic,” Andrews says. “As individual NGBs, we’re all relatively small, in reality. But the collective has about half a million households that you’re reaching, all of whom are generally more affluent households.”It isn’t an entirely original idea. Andrews recalls the Trio For Rio, a tie-up between USA Volleyball, USA Swimming and USA Track & Field that resulted in a deal with almond producer Blue Diamond Growers in 2016. Andrews also notes that, for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, U.S. Figure Skating, US Speedskating and USA Hockey have a hospitality collaboration called the Ice House, and U.S. Ski & Snowboard expanded its “HERoic” program, which supports the participation of female athletes and coaches, to seven NGBs for the 2025-26 season while adding drugmaker Eli Lilly as its presenting partner.Rising Tide: USRowing, which won gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics in the coxless four event, has about 79,000 individual members. Add in three other national governing bodies, however, and a new sponsor deal will reach about 700,000 members.BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty ImagesUltimately, banding together helps NGBs contend with one of their biggest challenges: They can’t sell sponsorships for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. For the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games, those rights belong to the organizing committee and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee—and they are quite lucrative. Founding partnerships for LA 2028 start at $200 million, according to Sports Business Journal.By comparison, the Range deal doesn’t provide an earth-shattering amount of money on an annual basis, but a six-figure sponsorship for an NGB is “really meaningful,” Andrews says. These organizations generally string together money from donors and corporate partnerships, along with limited funding from the USOPC, which USRowing CEO Amanda Krause says “doesn’t even cover 50% of our national team budget.” Revenues vary across the collective, from US Squash’s $9.4 million to USRowing’s $19.1 million, according to filings from their most recent fiscal years.“I was at some cocktail party, and someone said to me, ‘I once heard that running an Olympic sport is running a professional team with no money,’” Krause says. “It’s not that there’s no money—because we have a team that raises money and works on these partnerships—but the needs of the athletes and the team are the same as professional sports teams. There’s just no revenue tied to it.”That’s why Krause and her counterparts are so bullish on the potential impact of the collective, especially given its flexibility. Brands have discretion over which sports they want to work with, but the NGBs also have the right to opt out of deals. So if the collective wanted to add a watch partner, for example, US Sailing, which has a long-term relationship with Rolex, wouldn’t be forced into a conflict.In some cases, the collective setup could allow the NGBs to double up on sponsor categories. Range will be the exclusive wealth management partner of the initiative, but that doesn’t bar any of the participants from seeking an individual-level deal with another company in the space. “It’s really been designed to be a, frankly, non-binding way of working together,” Andrews says.For now, the focus is on delivering the best possible outcome on the Range partnership. Both sides have an opt-out after the first year, but USRowing’s Cobb sees it as a proof of concept for future deals.“Success breeds success,” she says.MORE FROM FORBESForbesSports Sponsorship Is Reaching Record Highs, Led By Shohei Ohtani And MLBBy Justin BirnbaumForbesWhy One Sponsor Is Rooting Against Djokovic And Other Australian Open FavoritesBy Matt CraigForbesTennis Star Frances Tiafoe Bets On Pro Padel With Investment In New York TeamBy Justin BirnbaumForbesFormula 1’s Most Valuable Teams 2025By Brett Knight